It sparked a thousand childhood nightmares – now the original workhouse from Oliver
Twist has been discovered. But a row has erupted over what to do with
the building. Lorna Bradbury reports.

It is perhaps the most powerful image of child poverty in literary history and one that resonates today just as it did in 1837, when monthly instalments of Dickens’s story first appeared: Oliver Twist’s plaintive cry for more, and the comic excess of the scene that follows, as the miserable child is hit about the head with a ladle. “That boy will be hung,” we are told. And that is the judgment Dickens’s humane, socially reforming – and, above all, satirical – novel seeks to overturn.

So it is not surprising that a buzz surrounds the new claim by Ruth Richardson, a historian of medicine and author of an acclaimed history of body snatching, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, that she has identified the model for the workhouse in Oliver Twist – and that the building in central London is now facing demolition. The irony is that, given Dickens's feelings about workhouses, he may well not have been supportive of the campaign to preserve it.

Dickens’s early life has been pored over by scholars who have focused on the way his family’s economic instability might have shaped the preoccupation with reform in so many of the great novels. But Richardson is the first to make explicit the connection between the old Strand Union Workhouse in Cleveland St and Dickens’s family home just nine doors down (at 22 Cleveland St, formerly 10 Norfolk St) where he lived between the ages of three and five, and again from 17 to 20.

“Dickens lived within earshot of the workhouse for several years – first as a child and again as a young newspaper reporter,” Richardson says, as we walk down Cleveland St past the former workhouse to stand outside Dickens’s house, part of which is now a button shop. “He’d have heard the stonebreakers’ hammers and the howls of pauper lunatics, smelt it on the wind. Mr Bumble walked right past his door. Cleveland St was the inspiration for Oliver Twist – that now seems certain.”

Richardson’s interpretation is, of course, speculative. There is no evidence of a direct link – in the form, for example, of a letter from Dickens describing his inspiration. But it is nevertheless compelling, and builds on the modern perception of Dickens’s novels as a series of attempts to rewrite his own miserable childhood.

He had 17 addresses in the first 21 years of his life and was forced to work at the age of 11 in a blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs, off the Strand, a fact he kept from his wife and acknowledged to his close friend and biographer, John Forster, only reluctantly at the end of his life.

“Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase,” Dickens recalled, “and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again.”

Shortly before this episode, his father’s financial instability, a result of his employment by the Navy and the fact that work dried up after the Napoleonic Wars, had become so chronic that the family was forced to spend a period in Marshalsea Debtors’ prison in Southwark, London.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a scholar of the 19th century, agrees with Richardson that Dickens would certainly have been influenced by the Cleveland St workhouse. The novelist’s powerful empathy with the needs of children, particularly the lost or abandoned such as Oliver Twist, might have been inspired by his work as a journalist, reporting on the debates surrounding the workhouses and the reform of the poor laws. But he was undeniably caught up in a lingering sense of himself as a boy wandering the streets at the age of 11 or 12.

“What we are only starting to realise,” Douglas-Fairhurst says, “is just how deeply these wounds cut into his memory. Dickens remained haunted by the parallel lives that could so easily have become his own.”

Both Douglas-Fairhurst and David Paroissien, the editor of the Dickens Quarterly, urge caution when considering any single model for the Oliver Twist workhouse. There has long been a debate among scholars about the possible location of the workhouse, with buildings having been proposed in Kettering and Spalding, as well as other towns to the north of London.

Paroissien says that any one-to-one connection between Oliver Twist and a Victorian workhouse is unlikely. “Dickensians have expended huge amounts of time, energy and ink trying to establish ‘originals’,” he says. “I don’t think Richardson falls into this group, only that some caution and scepticism are appropriate.”

Richardson’s campaign has already found support among scholars, including Dan Cruickshank and Gavin Stamp, and the actor Simon Callow, who are convinced of the building’s historical importance. What is remarkable about the building – and what Richardson argues should ensure its survival – is that it is one of only two Georgian workhouses remaining in London north of the Thames, and the only one to retain its original form.

It was built in 1775-78 under the old poor laws, as an H structure with a burial ground at the back. There have been several additions over the years, however, notably the new sections that went up on each side in the early 19th century. The back part of the building was rebuilt in about 1873 when, after reforms led by Joseph Rogers, the doctor and workhouse reformer who was the medical officer at the Cleveland St workhouse from 1856, it was turned into an infirmary. It functioned as a hospital, latterly as the outpatient department of the Middlesex, right up until 2005. It embodies the evolutionary history of the health service over the past couple of hundred years.

Tacita Vero has lived in the building since 2006, when Camelot Property Management was brought in to manage the vacant building. The company filled several wings of the building with residents who pay a basic rent in return for making sure it is not vandalised. Vero says that most of the 40 or so residents are young people who are prepared to put up with the basic living conditions and state of disrepair – and the oddity of living among the detritus of a hospital – in return for a low rent in central London.

“We are the happiest inhabitants these walls have ever had,” she tells me, when I ask whether she finds it spooky to be living in a building with such a peculiar past. “We are a group of young people doing a variety of creative projects. Any ghosts that might be here are not interested in us.”

English Heritage recommended in 2007 that the workhouse should be listed as a rare example of a Georgian workhouse, but their recommendation was rejected by Frank Dobson, the local MP, and Margaret Hodge, the then minister for culture. If it had been listed the question of demolition would now be irrelevant. And the matter of whether it should be listed cannot be revisited for five years from this date – too late, perhaps, for the Cleveland St building.

Dobson argued in a letter to Hodge of March 2008 that the building was of limited architectural merit, of limited rarity, given the presence of another surviving workhouse of the same era less than half a mile away in Manette St, Soho, and that English Heritage’s most compelling argument, of commemorating the life of Rogers, was a weak one. “It seems unlikely that he [Rogers] would be flattered to have them [the buildings on Cleveland St] retained, particularly at the expense of new affordable housing.” He says that Richardson’s “introduction of the Dickens link at this late stage is somewhat spurious”.

Of course it would be understandable if Richardson were overstating the case for the Cleveland St workhouse, given the threat of demolition that is hanging over the building. Richardson, a seasoned campaigner who was a vocal supporter of the campaign in 1989 to save the Rose Theatre on Bankside, says that a different decision might be made in the light of her discovery. “The link with Oliver Twist is a gift for the workhouse,” she says. “How could they possibly demolish it now?”

She says she is not against other ways of redeveloping the Cleveland St site, and is angry that no one has considered a plan that would preserve some portions of the existing building. “‘Lord, keep my memory green’ was a Dickens watchword,” she tells me. “That’s what the Cleveland St workhouse does: it stops us forgetting the horrors of 19th-century life, and helps us appreciate how far we’ve come.”

Walking along Cleveland St today, with so many of the buildings from Dickens’s time long gone, it’s difficult to imagine what the young novelist would have made of the workhouse as he passed it each day. Both he and Rogers – as Dobson suggests – might have been dubious about the Cleveland St campaigners’ desire to preserve the building, and might have enjoyed the idea of something new being created on the site. Dickens, after all, could hardly restrain his enthusiasm in 1853 when he witnessed Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris, mocking the City of London authorities for not following the French lead.

But part of him, surely, would have been saddened at the thought of a sledgehammer being taken to the past.